Re: [oldboys] Kingdom of Piracy <KOP> - call for submissions

[Mary Jo Aagerstoun <mjaag@wam.umd.edu>]

Kind of odd that a "piracy" project would copyright contributors????


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Mary Jo Aagerstoun
University of Maryland at College Park
mjaag@wam.umd.edu
www.artwomen.org
phone:(202)234-6038
fax:(202)332-1479
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On Wed, 21 Nov 2001, Cornelia Sollfrank wrote:

> Kingdom of Piracy <KOP>
> Online Exhibition
> http://kop.adac.com.tw
> 
> Acer Digital Art Center, Taiwan
> Joint Curation: Shu Lea Cheang, Armin Medosch, Yukiko Shikata
> Pilot launch: december , 2001
> Onsite exhibition: March, ArtFuture2002
> 
> Kingdom of Piracy <KOP> is an online, open work space which explores 
> piracy as the net's ultimate art form. Hosted by the Acer Digital Art 
> Center [ADAC] in Taiwan as part of ArtFuture 2002, [KOP] will include 
> links, objects, ideas, software, commissioned artists' projects, 
> critical writing and online streaming media events. The exhibition 
> will launch a pilot website in December 2001, and during the 
> following three months the project's curators will begin a process of 
> commissioning projects and written work. While remaining an online 
> exhibition, the totality of the workspace will be presented on site 
> in ArtFuture 2002, to be held in Taiwan in March. An edition of all 
> works commissioned will be kept on the ADAC server as an open-ended 
> online exhibition, whilst artists and authors will remain sole 
> copyright owners of their works.
> 
> With the increasing shift towards an immaterial or 'weightless' 
> economy, the concept of intellectual property rights has become one 
> of the key battle lines of our times. IP is at the core of big 
> industries from IT (including hardware and software) to entertainment 
> (music, film and books) to pharmaceuticals and biotech. A handful of 
> high profile cases such as Napster, DeCSS (DVD content encryption 
> system), SDMI and the Russian eBook hacker recently arrested in the 
> US have highlighted this battle.
> 
> The idea that IP rights should be rigidly enforced around the world 
> through patent and anti-piracy laws is hotly contested by a growing 
> alliance of researchers, open source developers, crackers and 
> hackers, artists and intellectuals. The patent law applied on plants, 
> seeds and other natural resources is further contested as biopiracy 
> by environmentalists. The purpose of Kingdom of Piracy <KOP> is to 
> consider the law and order provisions surrounding intellectual 
> property in the context of geographical and cultural borders, and to 
> examine the changes and challenges presented by information 
> technology.
> 
> The concept of intellectual property rights has no history in Asia. 
> The recent show destruction of millions of pirated CDs and DVDs in 
> China, a preliminary to the country's entry into the WTO, does not 
> change the fact that much of the Asian continent is still operating 
> completely on its own terms. The burst bubble of dot-commerce in the 
> early 21st century has plunged Taiwan and Asia's electronic supply 
> industries into recession, keeping the divide between Western and 
> Eastern economies as wide as ever. The Kingdom of Piracy will 
> consider this digital divide, and its sustaining strategies, from a 
> global perspective. Theorist Arthur Kroker speculated in 1994 about 
> 'digital abundance', imagining Taiwan as a tetra-gigabyte data 
> heaven, 'the largest data storage dump in the virtual world' 
> (ctheory.net). <KOP> envisions a virtual free state outside of 
> geography, time, corporate power and sovereignty; a decentralised, 
> fragmented, immanent entity in which everyone can be an autonomous 
> agent.
> 
> The Kingdom of Piracy is everywhere: on the fringes and in the 
> mainstream high-tech economies, from Asia to Eastern Europe to the 
> data havens of Sealand and hackers' garages in Silicon Valley. The 
> digital commons is bathing in millions of MP3s and an endless supply 
> of warez. Codes for appropriation, cut-and-paste, replication, 
> sampling and remixing have long been established as artistic 
> practice. <KOP> challenges artists, writers and practitioners to use 
> these techniques to question, contribute to, analyse and otherwise 
> address this growing Kingdom. It also asks them to become intimately 
> involved in the processes of the Kingdom itself, a place in which all 
> productions are part of an innately collaborative, derivative and 
> intimately interconnected environment of intellectual 'properties'.
> 
> Sponsored by Taiwan's Acer Group and hosted by Acer's Digital Art 
> Center server, Kingdom of Piracy invites allied crews of crackers and 
> artists to plug into the supply lines of digital abundance. The 
> <KOP>site will be an active public sphere for global data 
> trafficking, descrambling and jamming. Commissioned works are 
> encouraged to engage in acts of piracy for the causes of intellectual 
> enhancement and poetic intervention.
> 
> ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
> :::::"A smart artist makes the machine do the work":::::::::::::::::::::::
> ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: ::::::::::::::::
> :::::::::::::::::::::: [net.art generator]: http://www.obn.org/generator :
> ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
> :Cornelia Sollfrank | Rutschbahn 37 | 20146 Hamburg | Germany ::::::::::::
> ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::+49-(0)40-4104937:::mobile:+49-(0)173-6173348:
> 
> 
> 
> 
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